


Worth the Risk

by Coshledak



Category: Murdoch Mysteries
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, M/M, Mild Blood, Period-Typical Homophobia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-17
Updated: 2020-09-17
Packaged: 2021-03-07 21:07:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,278
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26504143
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Coshledak/pseuds/Coshledak
Summary: "He doesn’t know where to go after leaving the inspector’s office, so he just…goes."--The fallout of S13E18.Llewellyn Watts takes care of Jack after Inspector Brackenried gets him released from Station House One. And the world is on fire, but only a little bit.
Relationships: Jack Walker/Llewellyn Watts
Comments: 13
Kudos: 75





	Worth the Risk

He doesn’t know where to go after leaving the inspector’s office, so he just…goes. His legs are long and they know Toronto so he just goes, and goes, and goes. He thinks a few street vendors, ones he frequents for any assortment of food, call out to him in greeting if not for business, but he doesn’t even raise his head. Truthfully, he hears them, he does, but he would make very poor company right now in terms of small talk and his usual small talk isn’t often particularly good or small to start.

He knows where he wants to go, where he wants to be, but the few times he comes back into control of his own feet it takes monumental effort to steer himself away from Station House One. Loitering will help neither one of them and, in fact, might only hinder things further. Every route he charts for visiting Jack again, for trying to get him out, ends in a fiery crash in his mind. From imagining that every laughing constable to come out of the place has Jack’s name or situation on their tongue to running into Edwards directly—it’s all bad, bad, _bad._

But he can’t go home, and he won’t go back to work, so he just walks. He walks until the cold has gnawed away a sufficient amount of feeling in his toes and until the tips of his ears ache, and then he walks more, until the daylight starts disappearing too soon as it does in Canadian winters. He has to pause, to force Jack’s words about the dark from only a few nights ago out of his mind. 

He takes temporary refuge against the brick wall of an alleyway and catches breath he didn’t fully know he’d lost track of until now. He mutters to himself, quietly, to not think about Jack’s hand snagging in the back of his jacket, to not think about being pushed into an alleyway, pressed against a wall. To not think about how the cold disappeared and the dark seemed comforting when lips still tinged with the scent of beer found his.

But he does think about it, of course he does. His mind has never been a terribly compliant thing despite early efforts in his childhood and teenage years to wrangle it into a box of propriety and manners. He doesn’t know why it should change now, when his hands are trembling from something more heat than Toronto chill. 

He normally likes walking, likes the fresh air and the clarity it brings with it, but the air today has been stale and stagnant. It clings to his lungs and his mind, making everything a little bit tarnished. He wants the briskness, the lucidity, that early winter air in particular seems to bring, but it just hits, frozen and sharp, on the back of his throat with each breath.

It’s not fully dark when he does, finally, allow himself to loosely circle near Station House One. He starts off in a position down and across the street, then moves to one that's simply down the street. There is no way to be near any one hub of the constabulary and not see officers coming and going. Despite Llewellyn’s best attempt to stay out of anyone’s way, he’s learned that he is not an easy man to overlook.

A few that go by cast eyes at him in something of maligned greeting. Or, at least, it _feels_ maligned. There’s a chance that he’s reading too much into it, since none of them stops to speak to him, but there’s a chance that he isn’t. Whether those critical moments have to do with Jack or have to do with the terms on which he left Station House One is woefully ambiguous and will remain as such. Llewellyn isn’t about to ask any one of them if they’re glaring at him because they found him unpleasant to work with or because he’s waiting for a homosexual to be released. Or, perhaps, if they suspect that he is a homosexual.

He knows that he should put more thought, more care, into what Edwards might have told people, but he doesn’t have it to spare. Did Edwards tell them? Did he target Jack only to hurt him? Was the constable who let him down to the cells aware of the allegations Edwards implied? Did he report to Edwards, to anyone, that Llewellyn had, in fact, taken the bait and come to see Jack? Maybe. Maybe to all and maybe to none. It doesn’t matter to him just now. The compassion he’s carried in spades for Jack since they met is now not so much offered as pulled out of his chest by the forcible hook of circumstance.

He waits, and waits, and waits, his eyes jerking to the doors of Station House One any time they move. He fidgets with lint from his pocket, with a fragment of brick from the opposite wall that chipped easily under the scrape of his nail. After a while he no longer knows if he’s waiting for Jack to be released or if he’s waiting for a constable to place him under arrest as well. He’s left all of that in the inspector’s hands, hasn’t he? Foolish, but there was an optimism, a hope, to the fear he felt in that moment. He wishes he could find it again.

Finally, _finally_ something besides the constabulary blues comes out of the front doors. He knows that brown jacket, knows the hat, and he’s practically lurched out of the alleyway before he knows to think better of it. Has he not stopped trembling once since he’s left the inspector’s office?

He steps straight into Jack’s hurried path and, despite being nowhere near him, he sees him flinch. Llewellyn is no longer sure if the thing inside of him cracks or shatters.

“Jack—“ 

Jack raises his head. Even in the dark, with only the timid light of a street lamp, Llewellyn can see that his face is no better now than it had been when he’d come to see him before. They hadn’t given him anything to clean with, had simply let the bruises swell and the blood crust. The eye that isn’t swollen shut is wide for just a moment, then relieved, then so, so tired.

“Llewellyn,” he breathes, and the air shakes. “You—“ He swallows, his voice still a little rough. “You startled me.”

“I’m—May I…walk you home?”

Jack hesitates for a moment that stretches almost half the time Llewellyn has spent in the cold waiting for him, waiting to be arrested, waiting for _something_. Then the edge of mouth, broken bottom lip and all, lifts just slightly. It is not sardonic, or bitter, or even hurt. It’s just what patchwork fragments of a smile he can manage to piece together from the damage.

“Sure,” he says. “It’s dark, anyway.”

_No one can see what you’re getting up to._

They walk a little further away from Station House One along the sidewalk, keeping every centimeter of respectable distance between them, before they try to find an alleyway to walk down to keep from prying eyes. Llewellyn feels as though he is tethered to Jack’s person. He does not take a step out of line, a step out of what the minimum space is that he is forced to maintain for Jack’s safety, for his own safety. They don’t talk. He’s too distracted, anyway, making sure he keeps perfectly within the lines of too close and too far.

Toronto winters have a way of making hours feel later than they are, but they really do cut it very, very close to the curfew of Jack’s boarding house that night. Llewellyn can hear the superintendent’s door opening not a moment after he closes Jack’s door behind them. Any sooner and he might have seen the door closing, might have stopped to ask Jack why he was returning so late, might have seen his face, seen Llewellyn, seen—everything. If not everything then certainly too much.

He helps Jack out of his jacket once he sees him start to remove it and stop, as if something inside his very bone structure had been struck so hard that it made his whole being freeze to prevent the pain from worsening.

“Thank you,” Jack says, quietly, but whether that’s for discretion or intimacy or because quiet is the only volume he can manage right now, Llewellyn doesn’t know and is too afraid to ask.

“It’s no trouble,” he replies, thinking that, perhaps, there is some comfort to be found in simply responding. “Where’s your kit?”

“Second drawer.” Jack raises his arm a little towards a small countertop and its drawers beneath it. 

They’re both silent and still as they listen for the building owner to pass by Jack’s door, listen for the open and close of his own apartment. An extra breath, a moment to be certain, before Llewellyn retrieves the kit, setting it on the table. He tries to keep it from clattering, not sure why the wooden box is so unwieldy until Jack takes his hands. It’s only then that he realizes they’re still shaking, trembling something just on the precipice of violent.

“Llew,” Jack coos, sinking into one of two seats at the table.

Llewellyn had been standing but immediately crouches, almost perfectly in time, as if there were some invisible ceiling attached to the top of Jack’s head that pushed him down onto his knees. Something that required him to be lower in relative to him, something that pushes him to his knees at Jack’s feet, his hands still in Jack’s hands.

“I’m—“ He stares, wide eyed, at where Jack is holding his hands. Then his expression breaks, taking his voice with it, making it warble and water in his throat. “Jack, I’m so sorry. I’m—I wasn’t—“

There’s more to say, there’s so much more, but the words are books stacked on the back of his tongue. They’re too high, the volumes too thick, for him to topple them into words enough for this. They just choke him with all their poetry and philosophy and grandeur, sentiments, useless sentiments that feel so small and so fragile in a world that never cared to house them, let alone understand them.

Jack squeezes his hands, holds them tight for a moment, then transfers both of his hands to one of his. Llewellyn feels his fingers in his hair, at the back of his head. Feels the strong tug of his arm, pulling him to rest his head, at least, against Jack’s knees. Fingers dance over the short strands, down the back of his neck, dip just beneath the warmth of his collar. Then they move back up and start the steps all over again.

“Breathe, Llewellyn.”

And he does but it feels wrong in his mouth, in his throat, in his chest. He doesn’t cough but he’s choking anyway, oxygen turning to acrid smoke in his lungs so he races to exhale. He races to get it out, then tries again, but it’s more of the same. Jack squeezes his hands, both of them, and Llewellyn can’t remember when he slotted their fingers together, his ten against Jack’s five but he holds them like the odds were reversed.

Llewellyn squeezes back, holds onto him hard until the air in his lungs is more clear than gray, more pure than filth. His whole body is trembling now but, somehow, that feels more controlled than when it was in his hands. With every tremor, a little more of the shaking leaves him, teased out of his system by the lure of fingertips on the back of his neck.

He begins to say ‘I’m sorry’ again but realizes the words are already tumbling from his lips in a quiet mantra from some terrified corner of his heart. He doesn’t know when he started saying it, but it explains why Jack has been gentling him with soft strokes and softer words for so long. 

“It’s not your fault,” Jack says, but it’s not a chant. It’s not a mantra of platitudes rising against the tide of his chanted apologies. The words are precise and real and actualized in the syllables that Llewellyn gives him because he doesn’t know how to _stop_. “It’s okay, Llew. It’s not your fault. You did everything right. These things…they happen. They’ve happened before and they could happen again.”

The vibrations in his muscles momentarily reach such a magnitude that his whole body feels locked up at that. He stops fueling Jack’s words with the undercurrent of his apologies, his mind momentarily full of nothing but screaming on such a frequency that it’s a wonder his ears aren’t bleeding. Again. _Again?_

Again like how he had ended up in a cell again. Again like how he had lost Hubert the same way he lost Daniel. Again like how he lost Clarissa once, then twice, for however little he had had her. Again?

“—eathe, Llewellyn. Breathe.”

He’s afraid he’ll taste ash but he doesn’t, and he breathes a little deeper. It doesn’t help the terror wound through his muscles, but it quiets the screaming. His hands ache where they grip Jack’s. His fingertips, callused from his trade, perfectly rough in the way only reality can be, rub circles that Llewellyn can barely feel into the back of his neck. But he can feel them. He can, and he holds onto that.

“Again. I—I didn’t think it would…happen again,” he finishes, and he knows it’s a lie before he says it. He knows, but he says it anyway.

“Don’t sell yourself short.” Llewellyn doesn’t know how, how, _how_ Jack’s voice can sound so tired but still so warm despite it. Almost teasing, even in his exhaustion. “I think some part of you knew there’d be consequences.”

“Not like this.”

And that is true. He knew in a peripheral way. He knew in a Station House Four way, not a Station House One way. He knew in the way that the inspector threw around slurs and cost Glen his job. He knew in the way that Jack and Glen were held without regard to their reputations, to their livelihoods. He knew in the way that Edwards sneered about Germaine being a ‘fruit case.’ He knew in those ways.

He didn’t know in _this_ way. He didn’t know in blood and bruises. He didn’t know in threats and glass shards and targeting the man he loves because it was too risky to come after him. He didn’t know the way Jack seems to know.

“I told you,” Jack says, squeezing fondly at the back of his neck. “You’re worth the risk, Llewellyn. _This_ is the risk.”

The pull of Jack’s words makes him raise his head, to look at him, to look at the risk—his brutalized face and bloodied shirt and the knowledge that there are more bruises and cuts and damage that he can’t see beneath his clothes. That the risk is not just mean words and politics but fists and the soles of shoes, too. 

Jack’s finger tracks his stubble, maps the line of his jaw while holding him. He’s tired and sad and Llewellyn’s mind lags behind too much to know why until he speaks.

“If this is too much for you, I won’t hold it against you,” Jack says, like he has to but doesn’t want to. And his gaze drops down to Llewellyn’s lips or maybe his chin, he can’t be sure, and his voice sounds rough with something other than physical abuse. “If you—“

“No.” He unfolds himself, sits up on his knees. He takes both of Jack’s hands in his, meeting his eyes with the same conviction he felt in telling his inspector to charge him, reveling for just a moment in the resolution after being laid so low by fear. “No, I won’t— _leave_ you.”

Jack’s expression in the cells had been a repair job, and it is now, too. It is the place where a fist has put a hole in the wall and someone patched it over but the paint is too obviously new. It is firmness over fear, over pain. It is a sort of bravery that Llewellyn only hopes he can replicate, only hopes that he can deserve someday.

“I told you to let me handle it,” Jack says, his voice as jagged but as set as it had been in Station House One. Llewellyn hopes he will find the break in the waves that will allow him to breathe in a memory that doesn’t involve Station House One. “You’re a policeman—a detective—you can’t lose that over this.” A pause, no more than the thin line of a breath. “Over me.”

Llewellyn squeezes his hands, noting in an instance how perfect Jack’s are. No bruised knuckles. He didn’t fight back. Of course he didn’t.

“I already told my inspector to—“ He pulls in a breath, one that catches just faintly, and it feels normal the way it snags. “—to charge me.”

“You _what_?”

Llewellyn starts shaking his head, first swinging it to the left, holding it there as Jack speaks, before swinging it to the right then the left again.

“You—what were you thinking? I told you to let me handle it,” Jack says, and some new drug is injected into his voice but it hits the same as panic. “I told you not to implicate yourself, that I could—“

Llewellyn’s ‘no’s start off quiet, and he doesn’t let Jack’s hands go as he stands up, staying stooped enough to keep them folded between his palms. He hooks his ankle around the nearby chair and drags it closer, sits down in a way that doesn’t align with the seat’s intention but he doesn’t care. 

“No,” he says, once he’s seated, less of the mumble and murmur that it had been up to this point. More of a word. 

It drops, with the finality of the period key on a typewriter, right in the middle of Jack’s continued admonishments and hypotheticals for what he would have said, would have done, to protect him. He’s upset, but Llewellyn meets his eyes. He shakes his head again, once, then twice, without breaking eye contact. Jack’s eye looks a little wet, which softens the frustration in it into a reluctant resignation.

“If I’m worth the risk, then so are you.” He presses his lips together, swallows the knotted lump of emotions strangled out of him by the day’s events and leaves it to his stomach acid to dissolve. He feels the sharp dig of his elbows into his thighs, and he squeezes Jack’s hands again, hoping that the last of the overexcited tremors will finally be rid of him. “So are you, Jack.”

He bows his head to the hands he’s holding between both of his own and kisses the knuckles of Jack's folded fingers.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” Jack says, after a long pause that feels more like home than any of the pauses before it. There is no darkness to his voice, nor acidity. Perhaps just a faint sadness left in the wake of alarm bells.

“Mm,” Llewellyn hums, resting his chin now against Jack’s hands to look up at him. “You sound like my inspector. He said almost the exact same thing.”

“He’s right about some things.”

“Not about this.”

A pause, another one, but it’s only another room in the home of the previous one. They share air, share space, and there is comfort in that. More comfort, so much more comfort, than Llewellyn thinks he could find on his own.

“It was reckless.”

“Perhaps,” Llewellyn replies, amicably.

“It _was_ , Llewellyn. You said yourself that your colleagues didn’t know about you and that we should ‘ _endeavor to keep it that way._ ’ I was ready to do just that. But you—you…” Jack shakes his head. He probably wants to be mad, to put up a fight, but he’s too tired. Or maybe he doesn’t want this to be a fight at all and just has things he needs to say. “What changed?”

“It was the only thing I could think to _do_ ,” Llewellyn whispers, not as excuse or defense but as a confession or maybe a plea. Jack falls quiet and usually he doesn’t take quiet as invitation the way other people do, but he has more to say. “These past weeks together I have felt… _moored_ , in a way I never thought possible—in a way I never thought that I would care to be. But I have cared—a great deal—maybe even without knowing precisely how much until I was confronted with it.”

“…are you saying you felt… _lost_ without me?”

Llewellyn frowns, in some contemplation, at their hands. He finally releases Jack’s hands with one of his own, scratching at his stubble with his thumb. 

“Well, I was thinking ‘adrift’ was better suited to the metaphor, but, yes, ‘lost’ works just as well.”

He lifts his eyes to Jack, to his face, and so much of it looks like it borders on cracking as he fights down a smile. He can only imagine the pain, but it’s not doing anything to stop him. Like he can’t help it, and Llewellyn smiles, too.

“Help me get my face to a more agreeable state, will you?” Jack asks, reaching for the kit and pushing it towards Llewellyn.

“Oh, I always find your face most agreeable,” Llewellyn assures earnestly, standing up to get a wet cloth and wash basin. “The bruises do little to deter me.”

Jack holds a folded cloth, doused in water as cold as Llewellyn could stand, against his swollen eye while Llewellyn cleans the rest of his face. It’s a lot of gentle wiping, soft scrapes against the areas of dried blood to clean them away. The water in the basin has run the gamut of translucent pink shades by the time he’s finished placing the last of the antiseptic and bandages on Jack’s face. The swelling in his eye has gone down a little by the time Jack stands to change out of his soiled clothes. 

Llewellyn tidies up the kit and all the things used to get Jack’s face sorted. He wets the cloth again before checking the lock on the door and then joining Jack in the bedroom. He’s already slid into bed, looking on the cusp of passing out with his shoulders resting against his pillow. Llewellyn is glad, even for just a guilty moment, that he didn’t see the inevitable bruises and scrapes on the rest of his body. 

“Here,” he murmurs, sitting at the edge of Jack’s side of the bed. “For your eye. A little longer, if you can stand it, would help.”

Jack tips his face away from his pillow, taking the cloth from Llewellyn, and presses it over his eye again. He hisses a little, then lets out a long, low sigh. “Thank you.”

“Mm.”

He doesn’t move and, after a moment, Jack reaches out to rest a hand on his knee, squeezing it. Llewellyn doesn’t know, exactly, where his mind had taken his eyes, but they come back into focus to look at him. He raises his eyebrows in question.

“Come to bed, Llewellyn.”

Jack’s voice is wonderfully tender, dipped in invitation and sprinkled with soft supplication. It matches his visible eye, with heavy eyelid, and the exhaustion that rings around the crystalline coloration. 

“I don’t—I should probably go back to the boarding house,” he replies, his words equal measure regret and apology. “Edwards will be suspicious once he’s discovered that you’ve been freed. I suspect he’ll only become more keen to cause problems for both of us from now on.”

“All the more reason,” Jack implores, quietly, and Llewellyn can feel his thumb stroking through the material of his trousers. “If things will just get harder from this point on, why not allow us both tonight? While it’s still the easiest it’s ever been.”

Llewellyn swallows, his eyebrows furrowing, and he knows that there is a right answer and there is a correct answer just as well as he knows that those are different things. 

He begins again, on the unsteady ground of trepidation, of reluctance. “Jack—“

“ _Come to bed,_ Llewellyn,” Jack repeats. “Please.”

And he knew, after the first time, that if Jack asked again then he would be unable to say no. He knew that if he insisted, even once more, that he should come to bed then he would simply fold and allow it. Maybe Jack knew it, too, and asked before Llewellyn could talk himself out of it. He asked before the rationality could relay the correct answer to his mind, leaving him instead with the _right_ answer.

“I’m…beginning to appreciate your logic,” he says, slowly standing up to change out of his day clothes so he can slip into bed, hoping that Jack will perhaps associate the words with the kiss instead of the corpse.

His smile tells him that he does. A smile that stays until the lights are turned down; a smile that Llewellyn thinks he can still feel as they shift closer to each other under the covers. A smile that he tries to hold onto, just as Jack holds onto his arm when he lays it over his stomach. A smile that accompanies him to his dreams, allowing him to push off Edwards and repercussions and consequences to instead enjoy holding Jack like this for just a little while longer.


End file.
